This podcast is offered by the San Francisco Zen Center on the web at www.sfcc.org. Our public programs are made possible by donations from people like you. I'm just so grateful to be here, surrounded by beloved friends and folks maybe I haven't met. Maybe by the time I'll leave, we'll be a little closer. You know, my teacher trained here in the early 60s, and so basically learning about Zen for me was listening to my teacher rhapsodize about Suzuki Roshi every Sunday. So I have a deep feeling of appreciation for this place carrying forward such a beautiful legacy, and I just appreciate it all. the practice and work that enables this to be here so I can just show up.

[01:02]

So thank you all so much. Hmm. Yeah. So I think I'm just gonna, uh, jump into, uh, the material of the talk. So I'm going to be talking about Vasubandhu's three natures. Uh, and I know some of you maybe, uh, This means a lot to you, the terms Vasubandhu's three natures. And for some people, it's like, what? The first word, I don't know what it means. And the other three, I don't know what they refer to. So that is okay. That seems like the norm in Zen centers. Usually there are people everywhere I go who have been practicing much longer than I have, which is very humbling. And then there's usually someone who's... Maybe you're online. You're like, I just thought I'd drop into this and see what happens. Well, we'll find out. So Vasubandhu is an extremely influential Buddhist monk who lived in the 4th or 5th century in India and produced a very large body of literature that's had a really wide variety of influence on Buddhist traditions.

[02:14]

Vasubandhu is, in all Chan and Zen lineages, one of the great ancestors. is considered one of the six ornaments of Tibetan Buddhism, and is considered one of the five great ancestors of the Jodo Shinshu tradition, and probably shows up in some other traditions that I don't know about or recall. So a lot of ideas that Vasubandhu was part of formulating and developing and propagating and spreading are things that people nowadays in the U.S. might just think are Buddhist ideas. but they actually were quite innovative at the time that Vasubandhu and his colleagues were producing and kind of bringing them into Buddhism. So Vasubandhu is associated with various Buddhist movements, but the one I tend to focus on is called Yogacara, which means yoga practice. And Yogacara just refers to a Buddhist movement that was ultimately about integrating early Buddhist psychology,

[03:18]

with the Mahayana emphasis on collective and universal liberation. I like to say that in practical terms, what this is about is if you'd like to engage in social transformation, if you'd like to engage in making a world where we are not quite as overwhelmed by the climate crisis, or you'd like to diminish the amount of patriarchy in the world or racism, if you'd like to do that work and not just be hopelessly burned out, That's what Yogacara is about. It's about being able to care for ourselves and be well even as we involve ourselves in an extremely large scope of the possibility of collective liberation. So I teach Yogacara and I focused a lot on research and practice in Yogacara because it is part of the Zen tradition. So I feel some... I feel it's appropriate as a Zen teacher to be bringing this forward.

[04:22]

I teach it because I have found the teachings to be particularly transformative for me and people I know. And in large part, I do them because they form the philosophical basis and the underpinnings of Thich Nhat Hanh's vision for collective liberation. So Thich Nhat Hanh is the person who really brought me to Buddhism, certainly an enormously influential figure in Buddhism. in the last hundred years in Buddhism. And so I feel a deep gratitude. And he draws on many different aspects of Buddhism. But in looking, he had a very deep scholarly knowledge of Buddhism. And as he looked through many different traditions, it's clear that he saw that Yogacara really presented one of the clearest frameworks for how to do what he came to call engaged Buddhism. or this process where there can be a deep wellness for the individual, even as they go and directly meet great systemic harms.

[05:26]

So I, you know, I do this in a way to honor and carry forward Ty's beautiful vision. So let's see, I'll talk about the three natures. So... There are various kind of innovative things within Yogacara, innovative in relation to what had come before in Buddhism. So generally speaking, kind of the two most notable innovations are the idea of the Alaya Vishnana or the Stork Consciousness, which I'm not going to talk about. But some of you might go, oh, I've heard of that. And the other one is the three natures. And so I'll be talking about the three natures today. Three natures is... kind of it's fairly it's pretty philosophical so the idea is it gives you a way of looking at the world that is conducive to liberation and it gives you kind of tools for looking at the world in a way that's conducive to liberation because it turns out or it seems to me that a lot of the ways that we look at the world are not i don't know about you i uh i find myself looking at the world that a lot of ways that are conducive to my suffering or the suffering people around me and you turn on the news and you go boy

[06:39]

Seems like we could maybe do a little better. Maybe we could do a little better. So, the three natures are... This teaching says it is useful to view all phenomena or each phenomena as being of three natures. Or you could say as having three natures. Or you might also say it's useful to view... Each thing is having these three characteristics. So sometimes we use the term Lakshana, which means characteristic. Sometimes Svabaha, which means nature. So it's like everything you see, hear, smell, think, taste, any emotion, all of it you can see is having these three natures. And the claim is that will be beneficial. And I will try and forward that claim in the course of this talk in my time here. No, the three natures are. The imaginary, the dependent, and the complete realized natures.

[07:43]

The imaginary nature of things is what you think they are. The dependent nature is that they appear the way they do, dependent on other things. And the complete realized nature is that they are not what you think they are. No problem. Now, you might think, well, some of you may be thinking, yeah, that's just basic Buddhism. Some of you may be thinking, I don't know what you just said. And some of you may be realizing this is an enormously and radically challenging set of teachings. Anything you think is a thing is of imaginary nature, and its complete realized nature is that it's not what you think it is. And it is dependent on other things. So the implications of this teaching are pretty broad. And for those of you who've been around Buddhism quite a bit, you might see very clear commonalities between the idea of the absolute and relative nature of the two truths and the three natures are actually deeply related ideas.

[08:50]

So you might see a lot of like, oh, that sounds like that other thing. Yeah. And you're very likely correct. Yeah. One of the things that we'll see or I'll try and demonstrate here is that the fact that things are imaginary definitely does not mean that they don't matter. In fact, the three nature's teachings and the emphasis on the imaginary nature of things is very specifically there to reclaim the importance of what we do. So some teachings in Buddhism, when Yogacara arose, started to be confusing to people in that it looked like, if there are no eyes, no ears, no nose, no tongue, no body, no mind, no sight, no sound, no smell, no taste, no touch, no object, why am I doing this practice? And why does anything matter? Right? That's confusing. And that's okay. It's actually pretty useful in my experience to be confused. But here, we want to say...

[09:52]

We see things as imaginary because we are collectively involved and individually in every moment we're involved in the process of creating what will be experienced. That is to say, imagined. So I will talk about that a little bit more in a minute. But I just want to make sure you don't run out of the room thinking, this guy is saying that nothing matters because far from it. I'm going to read you a little passage from this book that I wrote. This is a new translation. This book contains a new translation of Vasubandhu's treatise on three natures, which is 38 verses in Sanskrit. I co-translated it with a partner named Wei Zhen Tang, who's a professor at Dharma Dram University in Taiwan. Wonderful, wonderful person. And then the book consists of one chapter of commentary on each verse. So I'm just going to read a little bit from the introduction. Every aspect of what we would conventionally call experience is of these three natures.

[11:01]

Sights, sounds, smells, tastes, physical sensations, thoughts, emotions, and our sense of being a self. For example, the cobalt blue car that I can see outside my window is of an imaginary nature. Whatever I'm experiencing it to be right now, a memory, as I'm currently looking at letters on a screen, or now, as I turn my head to look at it again, whatever I think it to be is a construction of habits of consciousness and imagination. I suspect it will take some time for you to consider this a reasonable or useful claim, and so, dear reader, that's why I'm writing this book. That car is also of a dependent nature. Countless conditions that are not the car create the appearance of a car. Reflected sunlight, ocular nerves, supply chain software, oil refineries, the desire for wealth, and so on. This car is also of complete realized nature.

[12:02]

It isn't what I think it is. Recognizing that things aren't what you think they are can radically disarm the patterns of your mind that cause you to suffer and cause suffering. For example, in order to see the car in my normal way, I am usually ignorant of or ignore a vast array of conditions on which the appearance of the car depends, conditions that cause suffering in this time of climate crisis. These teachings are to help us move beyond this kind of ignorance. The so-called knowledge that white people are inherently superior to black people and the purported fact that race exists as a biological phenomenon were confirmed by 19th century scientific experiments. which have since been disproven. This caused and causes incalculable harm. This knowledge, so-called knowledge, is imaginary. It arises from conditions, and its complete realized nature is that it is not real.

[13:08]

And yet, millions of people thought and still think it is true. Although many of us do not, the impacts of the view are pervasive. It affects where people live, The jobs we have, the wealth we inherit, our access to education, and so much more. They are alive in how I experience the world. This teaching is here so we may continually grow in our capacity to end and transform harmful patterns of which we are often unaware. By learning to see the three natures of the ideas that maintain harmful systems, we open the way for liberation. The three natures can be misapplied and easily misunderstood. Understanding the imaginary nature invites humility, not grandiosity. It affirms agency. It does not deny experiences. Understanding the dependent nature affirms kinship with all things. It does not deny differences or boundaries. Understanding the complete realized nature brings faith, compassion, and joy.

[14:13]

It does not deny suffering. The three natures provide medicine for our ongoing daily sufferings. no matter how small. So, in talking about this, and I would argue also in talking about emptiness, one of the principal challenges is to make sure you are not giving people the idea that their suffering and their experience does not matter or is invalid. And so, here, I'd just like to make clear that although the cobalt blue car from this analysis of the three natures is imaginary, its impacts are important. And what we're looking to see is transform how we look at things. So, for example, with the car, I usually see the car principally as an object to serve my interests. Is it what I want? Does it get me the things I want? So we see it through the lens first of ignorance, through our conceptions, which makes an imaginary nature, and then through the lens of desire and aversion.

[15:15]

And this, as Buddhists we know, produces the cycle of samsara. So we can begin to shed the delusion that just sees the objects through this narrow, imagined influence that's all based on our own set of needs and conditions and see them from a much broader frame, a systemic frame, where we see the dependent nature, where we see the collectivity of all phenomena, and where we begin to act from that sense. Likewise, with the idea of race, very clearly, race has impacts. So it's very common now in anti-racist work to start by acknowledging or investigating the fact that race is not a real thing. You can look at the historical construction of race as a concept, the building up and the propagating of it as a concept, the use of it in order to engage in transatlantic slave trade and colonialization. And then, having done that, you go, okay, we know race isn't real. We've all looked at that. And then someone might say, well, okay, now we're done.

[16:18]

We don't have to worry about it anymore. And then the work says, no, clearly there's work to do. We have to work to transform the harms that are caused by this thing, which is imaginary. So the model of that type of anti-racist work directly parallels what the three natures gives you as a model for how to engage in liberative practice. So I'm now going to work through and talk about Each nature in turn, imaginary, dependent, and complete realized natures. The imaginary nature. So what we're saying here is that in this moment of experience that looks like this to me, and for you, you could wave your hands around and say it looks like this to me. No, it's like this, that. Pretty cool. The entirety of what we... are experiencing is only how we're experiencing it and comes through the lens of our own process of experiencing.

[17:26]

So the basic way of talking about this in Yogacara is to say that every action of thought, so every thought is an action, every thought, every emotion, and every action with the body plants a seed which will produce a similar fruit at some later time. Sometimes we'll break this up a little differently. It's more common to say body, speech, and mind. I like to emphasize emotion because it's good to pay attention to how you feel. It's probably affecting how you act. Also, if we're involved in a process of liberation from suffering, I'm pretty sure our emotions matter. So we can say body, speech, and mind. Each action of body, speech, and mind plants a seed, which will produce a similar fruit later, or as I'm saying here, thought, emotion, or bodily action. So the idea is in this moment, whatever you're experiencing is the fruit of previous seeds. And right now you're planting seeds that will produce what is experienced in the world.

[18:29]

So the conventional term in Buddhism for describing this is karma. But the standard metaphor in Yogacara texts is seeds and fruit. So important to note that we never know when... a seed we plant will bear fruit. So it could be like in the next second, could be next week, could be in 100 years, could be in, or you'll see 20 years, could be in 550,000 years. We just don't know. But it will. That's the claim of this tradition. Every action that you commit will produce fruit. It always matters. So in simple terms, in case this seems excessively abstract, It's like if you look at someone and you go, that guy's such a jerk and they're always doing the stupid thing and if they would just do what I told them to do, everything would be good. I know you would never act like that or have that kind of thought, but were it to occur in that moment, thousands of seeds are being planted.

[19:32]

Seeds of alienation where that person looks clearly separate from you. Seeds of judgment where you're like, I know better than you and I have the absolute truth, this belief that I have the truth that they don't have. ably seeds of aversive emotion, irritation that are not even seen because we're so caught by the image and the thinking that we don't even turn in and really touch the feeling. So many, many seeds are planted in a moment like that. Likewise, in that little moment where you just walk up to the person at the store who's going to help you have food and you smile and maybe they look at you, they're like, but you still smile and you don't smile too much or try and make them smile. You just give them a reasonable amount of smile. Like it's okay. In that moment, you plant seeds of kindness, care of attention to how they're feeling and not trying to control them. Non-alienation, intimacy, non-violence, non-domination.

[20:38]

And these seeds will bear fruit. And this is not complicated, right? You just know it's true. You've seen it happen in your household in an evening. One way or the other. But on the other hand, the idea of the scope of this being so vast might be like, well, that takes a little bit of faith. Oh my goodness. What are we doing here? Are we involved in a religious practice? We might be. So, yeah, the imaginary nature for creating the world. And, you know, the imaginary nature, so to make this very explicit, the point is that you have power. You have liberative agency. Every sentient being, without exception, at every moment, always has the capacity to do something to liberation, for liberation, and no matter what, is always doing something that is conducive to suffering or non-suffering.

[21:40]

So no pressure. I get a little fired up because I think it's amazing. You know, one of my mentors, Michael O'Neill, once just said to me, your life is not trivial. You know this, you folks know this, in this place where so much attention is brought. to doing each thing for the liberation of all beings, to just let that aspiration flow through your heart, even when you're brushing your teeth, washing your dishes. Why it's so precious that you are here doing this. So I can go somewhere else and talk to other people who've never experienced anything like residential practice and be like, yeah, you can bring this right into your house and be embodied. Yeah, so possibility. Things are imaginary.

[22:43]

That means they're possible. Liberation is possible. And they're imaginary, so imagining things is cool. It's cool. You're like, hey, I would like to imagine having a thing where we go out in the community and give people sandwiches. You can imagine that, and then it can happen. It's cool. This is not like your imagination sucks. Pretty soon you'll get to the complete realized nature and it'll be great. Well, there may be a little of that in there. So this reminds us of the power and the importance of each moment of activity and of the imaginative capacity of sentient beings. Okay. So I'm going to talk a little bit about the dependent nature. So the dependent nature, you know, sometimes in yoga chara texts, they'll refer to conceptualizing dependence or conceptualizing interdependence, which just means thinking about how one thing depends on other things.

[23:48]

So I will take the example of, like, you go to the store and you purchase some broccoli, and you're like, no, this broccoli is mine. Now, you could sit down and you could... analyze the broccoli and be like, wow, think of all the things that make it so this broccoli can be here, which is a lot. You know, worms, earth, truck drivers, love, people wanting money, sunshine. Amazing. Or you could turn it in and be like, let's analyze the conditions that make me believe I can own things. This is my favorite. Where did that come from? Yeah, let's check it out. So conceptualizing interdependence, it's very useful to just pause and be like, where? Let's just think about some, just a few of the things on which this depends, which of course are vast beyond knowing. Pretty much, I don't know about infinity, but you're not going to run out of things on which each thing depends. So that's a conceptual approach to being more aware of or of the dependent nature of things.

[25:09]

I believe that Zazen in particular, but many meditative practices naturally help us to be aware of the dependent nature of things because there is a quieting of that kind of constant alienating. centering of the self that the mind does. This is very common. People come to our then center and they'll sit in the morning. Minnesota's then meditation center is on a lakefront, which is very nice. I'm very grateful. They'll come back a few days later and they'll be like, wow, I had walked by that lake so many times and I went out and I'd just never seen it like that. We were just... Like, they're together, and, you know, birds. They have a hard time describing it. We have a hard time describing it, right? Anybody who's, you ever, any folks try and talk about Zen with your family?

[26:11]

Oh! And they're like, what? A natural sense of intimacy. The dependent nature is about intimacy, realizing that the apparent self here is completely dependent on the apparent other. And everything within that field is entirely dependent on all the other things. Deep intimacy. So we just, this becomes a felt sense for many people. And it can feel really good. Really good. Becoming more aware of the dependent nature also can be pretty afflictive though. Because in the broadest sense. To be aware of the dependent nature of things also includes realizing you can't be separate from any suffering anywhere, which sounds like a lot. I'm not suggesting you just try and like, can I possibly take in every? No, that's not what it's about. But you see that that separation is always imaginary because everything is bound together.

[27:15]

And that can be hard. And, you know, we see this in processes. If you think, for those of you familiar with the ecological work of Joanna Macy, she uses this as kind of the starting point. She says you have to look at how we are actually part of the process by which all these species are going extinct and harms are being done. And it's painful. As you move closer to seeing that systemic harm, suffering occurs. So it can be really hard. And likewise, you know, it's like, you know, if you're like a white guy like me with a female spouse, And they come in and go, you know, you're just kind of coming with this privileged framework and like, could you just do the dishes? Oh, me? I thought the patriarchy was those bad people over there. I'm part of this. You know, people point out that we're part of these systemic harms. This can be hard.

[28:15]

A lot of anti-racism work that I do with a lot of white people involves just... being able to acknowledge that we're part of it. We're part of it. But here's the cool thing. Part of it. And we're imagining it with the world, which means we have power to do something. And that feels good. Instead of pretending you're not a part of something, that you are, to just realize it's true and then say, I can make an offering. So sometimes the process is painful. But ultimately, so much more liberative to just realize I have agency here. I'm not just a victim. It's not fun. How many people in this room, you don't have to raise your hands, opened up the news within the last few weeks and just thought, it's too big. I can't do anything. I did all my voting. I showed up for the things. I went to the things. I did the meetings. I studied the stuff. And I've been working on this for 40 years.

[29:18]

I've been working on this for 50 years. It is still terrible. People have literally, literally died for liberation from certainly racism in the United States. And still, right? I thought we were making so much progress around transgender rights in this country. And now, ah, it feels like we're going backwards. Anguish. And yet, I've let it in. Oh, wait a minute. I can do something. Yeah, I can't fix it, but I can do something. So, yeah, I'm going to read something about the dependent nature. It may be useful to know before I start reading that I am a recovering alcoholic and drug addict.

[30:19]

I've been sober for five minutes. Just kidding. That was a terrible joke. I don't know what I'm doing. I've been sober for a long time, and I'm very grateful. Deeply grateful. We don't passively receive the reality of the world through our senses and then respond to it. The world we experience is created. It is the active cognition of seer and seen. That's from the text. The active cognition of seer and seen is what we experience. Our life is created by our karma and we create karma in every moment. We have the power to plant seeds that will create a better world. This body of teachings emphasizes the impact of each moment of intentionality. Our power lies in the quality of heart and mind we offer to the moment. Why do I think this worldview is more effective than materialism for healing our suffering and freeing us from collective modes of violence, oppression, and destruction?

[31:25]

I will answer with some lines from a Chinese Chan nun named Bao Qi, who wrote, The vastness of karmic consciousness is hard to prove, but when Mr. Zhang drinks, then Mr. Li gets drunk. Sometimes I get a call or I see an obituary telling me that another friend of mine has died from addiction. I've lost a dozen friends so far, and I can never know what part my enabling of their intoxication played or the impact their deaths and addictions will have on future generations of their families. The web is too complex to map with materialist tools. I can never know the impact of the thousands of hours I've spent working with addicts in recovery either. I have witnessed the awakening of so much freedom. One of Bao Chi's inspirations, the great Chan Nun Miaozong, wrote, When outside the diamond door he glowered, inside the stable the wooden horse's face turned red.

[32:33]

In the verse above, there is no physical connection between the man's glower and the wooden horse's face, and yet there is reaction and connection. We cannot ultimately know when or where the results of any karmic seed will manifest, but manifest they will. Miaozong wrote her lines in a Chan compilation she created in the 12th century. But could she have known that in the 17th century, Baoqi and her Dharma sister Zukwi, looking to revive the rarely recorded teachings of a female master of Chan, would pull them from obscurity and write their own commentaries? Or that Beata Grant in the 21st century would again revive them in English? I believe that buying a chunk of an animal killed thousands of miles away, or offering a caring smile for a person on the street, as well as each tiny moment of anxiety, desire, or compassion you cultivate has an impact on every living being.

[33:33]

I can't measure it. Miaozong says the wooden horse's face turns red. A wooden horse is a classic Buddhist metaphor for something that has no reality or causal agency, like the horns of a rabbit, a wooden man, or a stone woman. Miaozang invites us into a worldview of mystery, where we don't know or see what is ultimately real, but where an angry glare causes suffering we can't calculate, where a smile has radiance beyond the limits of our knowing, where our actions really matter. All of this isn't real. But it's as real as it gets. So everything is imaginary, dependent, and complete realized nature. It's already real. As real as it gets. Complete realized, paranishpana. The connotations of the Sanskrit term have to do with wholeness. Sometimes people will say fulfilled.

[34:36]

So the idea is the complete realized nature is what Buddhists see. I would say you could sum up what makes a Buddha a Buddha by saying a Buddha is a sentient being that does not suffer, does not cause suffering, and sees what is real. And it is in seeing what is real that the capacity to not suffer and not cause suffering is manifest. And the thing is, the literature we have about Buddhas is of a person who hung out with other people. So they didn't go somewhere else. where they saw some real stuff and didn't suffer. They were right here in the same shared environment, seeing what is real and not suffering and not causing suffering. Now, I don't know if that's absolutely true, but this is the literature we have, and this is the ideal and the picture Buddhism gives us. So the thing is, it's possible to see what is real. That's the claim of this tradition. But I'll just say from the three natures framework,

[35:37]

It's already of complete realized nature. You're not seeing something other than the complete realized nature right now. Things already aren't what you think they are. And all the complete realized nature is, is seeing that things as objects that you usually do isn't an absolute reality. They're not the objects that we think them to be, which can be like manipulated, controlled. So in talking about, you might think, that seems so crazy. I'm telling you, you're already in the Buddha land. Oh, and you're already Buddha. But you probably hear this in here all the time because this is a nice Mahayana place. So the nice thing is that free natures give us some nice, for people who enjoy logic, you can be like, oh, there's a logical argument for why that's true. It can kind of be a little satisfying for some of us who, aren't deeply naturally religious.

[36:39]

In talking about the complete realized nature of things, in many texts in Buddhism that come out of the Yogacara tradition, we see talking about the complete realized nature of the phenomena that would be conventionally understood to be the self, and the complete realized nature of the phenomena that would be conventionally understood to be other. I'm not just saying self and other because... complete realized nature is that they're not really self and other. Anyway, at the end of Vasubandhu's 30 verses on Consciousness Only, the last line says, this is the inconceivable, wholesome, unstained, constant realm, the blissful body of liberation, the Dharma body of the great sage. And I can only gesture with my own limbs, but if you were chanting the text, you could point out to the apparent external world and say, this is the inconceivable, wholesome, unstained, constant realm, And this is the blissful body of liberation, the Dharma body of the great sage. And you might think, boy, for a Dharma body that's blissful, it sure feels sore and grumpy. It's okay.

[37:47]

We're not denying the imaginary nature. We're not denying the way you experience it as having its here-ness, its here-ness. So at the end of the Song of Zasen, Hakuin paraphrases, the last line of the 30 verses unconscious is only. He says it a lot simpler. He says, this very place is the lotus land, this very body, the Buddha. Dogen Zenji, in the Phukans of Zenji, when he's like, now I'm going to tell you why and how to practice Zazen, begins thus. The way is originally perfect and all-pervading. How could it be contingent on practice and realization? The true vehicle is self-sufficient. What need is there for special effort? Indeed, the whole body is free from dust, It is, who could believe in a means to brush it clean? It is never apart from this very place. What is the use of traveling around to practice? It's the same message. Oh, complete realized nature is here, and that's why you should practice.

[38:52]

Well, I wouldn't have thought of that myself, but I found it pretty inspiring. I found it pretty inspiring. So I'm going to read two short passages from this book related to the complete realized nature of the phenomena conventionally understood to be the self, and then the complete realized nature of the phenomena conventionally understood to be other. And that will conclude my talk. This is from a chapter called Already Buddha. When I came to Buddhist practice, I was seeking something else. I sought an escape from the anguish I experienced. My therapist told me it was the anguish of trauma from the past reproducing itself. My psychiatrist told me my brain didn't process serotonin properly. My addiction recovery friends called it defects of character, self-will, run riot.

[39:54]

My Buddhist studies called it afflictive karma. All these ways of looking at it have their utility, and I am deeply grateful for all who have supported me in finding the wondrous, joyful existence of today. When we suffer, when we see the suffering of others, it is right wellness to seek something else. However, it is also true that there is not something else, that you and I are not and cannot be broken. For if there is brokenness, there must be a wholeness that is elsewhere. This is a duality, and duality is just a habit of mind. And regarding the complete realized nature of the phenomena conventionally understood to be other, or we could say of where we're at, Recently, I heard a talk by a Dakota elder named Bob Klanderud.

[40:57]

He spoke of the total kinship of all life. He told us that the confluence of the Mississippi and Minnesota rivers near my home on U.S. occupied Dakota land is called Bedote. For the Dakota, Bedote is the origin of the universe, the land of Genesis. In his words, it is Eden. He asked us, Now that you know you live in Eden, how will you choose to live? Thank you for your kind attention. Thank you for listening to this podcast offered by the San Francisco Zen Center. Our Dharma talks are offered free of charge, and this is made possible by the donations we receive. Your financial support helps us to continue to offer the Dharma. For more information, please visit sfzc.org and click Giving.

[42:02]

May we fully enjoy the Dharma.

[42:05]

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